Margaret Atwood, author of such novels as The Handmaid’s
Tale and Cat’s Eye, is back with a vengeance. Atwood publishes
nearly a book a year, so she’s never really left, but she writes in so many
different genres that her novels—for which she’s best known—only come out every
three or four years. Last month Atwood released her newest novel, Alias
Grace.

Alias
Grace is the fictionalized account of Grace Marks, a notorious
nineteenth-century Canadian woman convicted as an accessory in the murder of
her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper/mistress, Nancy Montgomery.
Kinnear’s manservant, James McDermott, ultimately is hanged for the crime, but
nobody knows what to do with Grace. Shuttled back and forth between prison and
the insane asylum, Grace is a mystery to the authorities. They just can’t get a
handle on her sanity, and none of the doctors, lawyers, or clergy drawn into
the case can definitively tell whether she’s a cold-blooded killer or just a
victim of circumstance.

The
story is sensational, but like the Lizzie Borden or Ted Bundy cases, there are
deeply rooted reasons for its appeal. “One,” Atwood says, “you have a
household. They’re getting along fine. A Gentleman in easy circumstances, probably
a remittance man. Younger son, doubtless sent to the Colonies because of his
soft and loose ways by the older, who has inherited property and who wishes to
cut a respectable figure. If [Kinnear’s] having an affair with his housekeeper
in Canada, he’s probably done similar things before. … Probably unbeknownst to
him Nancy is pregnant. He feels he needed more servant help. They have hired a
manservant, James McDermott. And right after that, along comes Grace Marks.
These two people are only in the household for three weeks when, bang, there’s
a double murder. What on earth went on among those four people?

“Number
two—opinion on Grace was very divided, as it usually is when there’s a violent
crime involving both a man and a woman. Usually opinion is undivided about the
man—he dunnit—and divided about the woman. Was she the demon instigator? Was
she playing Bonnie to his Clyde? Or was she a terrorized bystander only
peripherally involved, fleeing out of terror for her own life?”

Although
Grace was the O.J. Simpson of her age, time has neglected her, leaving only
shadows on the cultural record. “I came across [the story] first in a book by a
person of the time called Susanna Moodie, who spent seven horrible years in the
woods, because her family had emigrated,” Atwood says. “She wrote a book called
Roughing it in the Bush, which was directed to other English
gentlepeople telling them not to do it. She visited the Kingston Penitentiary,
as you could in those days, sort of like a zoo tour. And there she asked to see
Grace Marks, because Grace Marks was notorious in her day. And she saw Grace
Marks, and then she wrote up what she remembered of the case. She wrote it from
memory. Her memory wasn’t good. And then [later] she went on to visit the
Toronto Lunatic Asylum, and there was Grace in that place, because she had
meanwhile been transferred. Susanna Moodie’s eyewitness accounts said she was
absolutely screaming out of her mind—says Susanna Moodie. But people faked
those things. Especially convicts did, because it was nicer in the asylum. And
Susanna Moodie ends her account of the whole thing by saying possibly Grace was
deranged at the time of the crime and that accounts for it all, and therefore
she will be forgiven in the afterlife.”

Atwood
wasn’t satisfied with Grace’s skewed legacy, so she dug deeper. What she found
was a story so warped, so mired in nineteenth-century misogyny, that she had to
tell her own version. “Susanna Moodie [also] has a little Victorian play,”
Atwood says. “Grace is the villain. James McDermott is the dupe. She got him
into it, led him on, instigated the whole thing, because she was jealous of
Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper and mistress, and in love with Thomas
Kinnear, the gentleman master. So all she wants killed is Nancy, and she
doesn’t really think he’s going to do it, and when he does, she [is shocked],
and he says, ‘Now we have to kill Thomas Kinnear.’ She says, ‘No, no. That
wasn’t part of the plan,’ and he says, ‘Ah ha, now I see it all, and now I
realize what your real motive was when you promised me you in return for
killing Nancy, and now you’ve got to deliver, and now I’m going to kill
[Kinnear],’ and so he does. And then everything else follows along from that.
And Moodie tells the whole thing from the point of view of McDermott. She tells
it through his persona and ends with him sort of screaming and raving about how
it was really Grace. There’s a little bit of grounds for her story, because
right before he was hanged he did say that Grace was the instigator of the whole
thing and that she had helped him strangle Nancy. But he was known to be a
liar. Who are you going to credit?

“So
that’s the Moodie story, and that’s the only story I knew for quite a long
time. And I did write a little television play based on it, although I never
did believe her statement that they had cut Nancy up into four quarters before
putting her into the washtub. Somebody suggested that I try turning it into a
play, and I did try, but I’m not really a playwright, and it didn’t really work
out. I was still just using Moodie’s version. Time went by, lots of time went
by, and I started working on the current novel, and at that point I went back
to the historical record, such as it was, and found out that Susanna Moodie in
fact had not remembered very accurately”

When
Atwood recovered more of Grace’s story, she found that there were in fact three
Graces: the murderer, the clueless ingénue, and the hidden Grace that nobody
could discern. The disparity between the accounts fascinated her, and she wanted
to explore how a public persona gets created.

“Here
you have this divided opinion,” Atwood says, “and then you get people writing
about her, projecting onto her all of the received opinions about women, about
criminality, about servants, about insanity, sexuality. All of these things
just get projected onto her. So I was interested in that. I was interested in
the process of public opinion and how it’s formed, how people read into
situations their own concerns. How each person, even people who are witnesses,
have their own version.”

With
such an elusive main character, Atwood had to completely invent a persona for
Grace. Part of how she does this is by introducing Simon Jordan into the fray.
Jordan, an upstart in the nascent field of mental health care, becomes
interested in Grace’s dilemma, and he visits her at the penitentiary in the
hopes of drawing out the real Grace. Despite Jordan’s amiable incompetence, he
partly succeeds, and Grace tells him as much about her life as she thinks he
can handle. Atwood writes much of the novel from Grace’s point of view, and the
reader gets to see into the parts of Grace that Jordan doesn’t.

The
reader, then, and not Simon Jordan, discovers Grace Marks’ story. And as in so
many of Atwood’s novels, the story is astonishing. Atwood imagines Grace so
full of humanity, so rich in life—and in contradiction—that even as she opens
up to the reader, she still recedes. Even as she tells you point-blank what
happened to her, she just becomes more of a puzzle.

Like
Atwood’s other novels, Alias Grace offers a nearly encyclopedic
portrayal of the characters’ world. There’s seemingly nothing that Atwood
doesn’t know about nineteenth-century life, and in researching for the novel,
Atwood found herself becoming an expert on everything from Spiritualism to
popular psychology to quilting. By finding out what people did every day,
Atwood was able to give the novel both fullness and form. As a domestic
servant, one of Grace’s only pleasures is quilting, and Atwood uses this motif
to divide the novel into its various sections. She names each chapter after a
different type of quilt, and in looking at this vast novel as a whole, the
reader gets the sense of a larger pattern.

“It
got bigger than I intended it to be,” Atwood says. “I think originally there
were only nine quilt-pattern titles, and then I just needed more. I needed to
have more to cover the actual story as it unfolded.”

What
unfolds ultimately is that no one will ever know Grace. Writers, doctors, and
lawyers can take aspects of her and exploit them to support their theories, but
Atwood challenges the reader to not take sides, to not simply work toward a
guilty or not-guilty verdict.

“The
fullness is the point of Grace,” Atwood says. “And the other point is that
there are some things that, although there is an answer to them, it’s not an
answer that we will ever know. We will never know the true story of the John
Kennedy assassination, because even if Mr. X emerges and says, ‘Well, it was me
all along,’ the waters have been so muddied that we’re not going to believe
him.”

So
despite Atwood’s crystal-clear vision, she leaves the story as muddy as history
itself. There’s no way to recover Grace Marks fully, and with Alias Grace Atwood
has done her the greatest service a novelist could do: She’s left her intact
and in peace.